Virtual Machine Hardware Version does make a difference

For years, I have dismissed Virtual Machine Hardware version as unimportant. In fact, in this very blog, I may have advocated for leaving VM Hardware Version set at 8, to maintain full compatibility with both the vSphere C# Client and the vSphere Web Client.

Unfortunately, thanks to Spectre and Meltdown, things have changed. Updating your VM Hardware Version also updates the VM BIOS, and that’s an important part in the remediation of Speculative Execution Vulnerabilities, specifically: CVE-2017-5715 ‘Spectre Variant 2’.

Interestingly, this also highlighted another train of VMware: referring to the same thing by many names. In this case, we are talking about the Virtual Machine Hardware Version, but you will see the same thing called (by VMware) as: